Educating Future Software Professionals On Outsourced Software Development

Software Development is undergoing a not-so-quiet outsourcing revolution. IT tasks, from documentation to customer support to testing, have moved offshore. Development was considered untouchable, in the realm of highly-skilled tasks that require development staffs to be trained and located near business stakeholders. Recent events have clearly shown that cost drivers exert the necessary pressures to invalidate this claim. The challenge then, is for software engineering programs in higher education to construct curricular models that achieve outcomes that include knowledge of, if not some measurable level of competency in, outsourced development best practices. We present a process-oriented undertaking between three campuses, Arizona State University East, Arizona State University Tempe, and Georgetown University, to experiment with learning objectives focused on outsourced development models.